The present invention relates to managing the processing of processing requests in a data processing system comprising a plurality of processing environments.
Some computer systems are arranged with multiple runtime environment management application programs capable of providing a plurality of cloned runtime environments. Each such runtime environment is capable of running a set of application programs. Multiple runtime environments enable the services of the set of application programs to be provided with high availability and to a larger number of users.
In such multiple runtime arrangements, a workload manager module is commonly provided for receiving and distributing processing requests to the appropriate application programs running in one or more of the multiple runtime environments. However, the memory available to a runtime environment may not be sufficient to store all of the application programs that would be required to satisfy all possible processing requests. Therefore, at any given time, a particular runtime environment may not be loaded with all of the application programs required to deal with received processing requests.
In such a situation, if a runtime environment receives a processing request and the application program required to process the request is not currently loaded, the required application program is loaded in order to meet the processing request. In some situations, one or more application programs that are currently loaded in the memory of the runtime environment may need to be cleared in order to provide sufficient space to load the application program required to meet the received processing request.